Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye » think and grow rich

Mean People Suck! (How To Not Let Toxic People Beat You Down)

Loren Woirhaye — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 15:59:41 +0000

Mean People Suck! (How To Not Let Toxic People Beat You Down) is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

Mean People Suck!

If you want to write your own ticket, run your own show, you’re gonna have encounters with people who want to stop you. On the surface they may believe they love you and are trying to save you from humiliation and failure. The slap sometimes comes in a velvet glove.

Almost everybody tries to project their own values onto other people. That’s how insecurity manifests, usually. The person doing the projecting (onto you) is feeling ,”I can’t value what you do because I’m scared and don’t understand,” and so they say and do things to discourage you.

My first tip is not to enter into direct confrontation with the naysayers until and unless it is necessary. However, if the negative person’s influence on you is especially toxic or over-bearing, there may be no way to stop their energetic encroachment except a confrontation. The problem with making a confrontation with such a person is they’ll probably unleash a lot of bad feelings towards you and if you’re not strong, you’ll feel it and it will hurt and affect your resolve.

Energetically, the person abusing you may be saying ,”I need you,” – as in “I need you to validate the way I feel about the world,”. Usually you’re not allowed to disagree with such a person without offending them or hurting their feelings. Such people are common, and the hooks they get into you are emotional in nature.

Thus, in order to set limits on toxic people who drag you down, you’re going to need some psychological tools to set limits with them.

The most useful tool, in my experience, is emotional detachment. Don’t let the conflict rile you up, or at least try to keep your energy as quiet and centered in the moment as you can. When you detach and set limits with a toxic person, they may heap abuse on you and it will be hard for you to just take it without fighting back. Unless there is a physical assault happening, don’t fight back verbally. As long as the attack is verbal only, don’t try to defend yourself and don’t try to hurt the mean person who attacks you verbally – because when you do you just meet their energy and feed into it.

This brings me to another useful tool: silence.

There is power in silence. It works on many levels. Only when you shut up can you truly hear what’s going on around you.

A toxic person who has his or her hooks in you and won’t make an effort to understand what you’re doing or try to see things from your point of view will resent you anyway. Don’t give them too much information. Remember, they are looking for vulnerabilities in you in order to draw you into their own insecurity. If you know a person who will eventually use everything you reveal to him or her against you – and we’ve all known them - learn to keep your thoughts to yourself.

If you live in a household, for example, where another person criticizes your entrepreneurial plans but makes no sincere effort to understand those plans well enough to be constructive, learn to keep your plans to yourself. Silence is power. You have no idea how powerful silence is until you start to use it as a tool to build and preserve your own strength.

Of course the other person may accuse you of witholding to hurt them, but just turn the conversation away from you and towards what the other person is interested in. For example, if the toxic person is needling you to get information about your entrepreneurial plans in order to criticize you (you’ve seen it before so you know the signs), turn that person’s attention elsewhere – towards food for example. Say “I wonder if there’s any ice cream in the freezer” or something.

Napoleon Hill in his classic book “Think and Grow Rich” writes about the importance of keeping the details of your plans to yourself until and unless you find somebody who supports and encourages you in a totally positive way. You should seek such people out, but don’t try to reform a toxic person into a supportive person; it won’t work.

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.

Ozzy Ozborne, Malibu Freaks, Yoga and The Universal Laws of Abundance and Prosperity

Loren Woirhaye — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 16:31:33 +0000

Ozzy Ozborne, Malibu Freaks, Yoga and The Universal Laws of Abundance and Prosperity is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

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Sooner or later, you may come to the conclusion that I am not a safe-n-sane online marketing-expert dude, but really some sort of crazy freak. That’s ok – because from my point of view non-freaky people are a bit dull. If you were to become a client or friend of mine you’d find out sooner or later, so I might as well admit it.

While not in the class of freaky, the truth is I prefer playing guitar and reading fiction to the fussy business of how you make money with all this crazy website stuff, but we all have to make a living, don’t we?

Photo by Lululemon Athletica

Before 4 or 5 years years ago making a lot of money was not high on my priority list at all. Even though I’d been selling on Ebay since 1999, I treated it mostly as a hobby, not a career. It wasn’t that I saw making money as being un-spiritual or bad – I was just involved in stuff where money wasn’t the big criteria.

I was involved in yoga, music, shamanistic “healing work” between the ages of 23 and 35. In fact, I lived in Malibu, California for several years (hence the blog name), which is a veritable hotbed of freaky people activity compared to which my own freak-ness is quite tame. I could tell you some stories… but we’ll save that for another day.

Incidentally, Malibu is as much a state of mind as a place and furthermore, there are two Malibus: “the movie star” sandy beach Malibu where Ozzy Ozborne and Britney Spears have homes, and the “coyote ate the cat” Malibu which is more of a mountainous coastal desert region. I lived in the mountains.

“The trip I get hung-up about is that if I get into the spiritual field of looking at things, I think I’m not being pragmatic or practical. Thus I have this ongoing push-pull with my freaky self and my pragmatic, results-oriented self.”

On closer examination and growing a bit more sure of myself however, I’m now ready to declare my beliefs to you: You can be spiritual and metaphysical and also very much in the mix and making money. The two do indeed mix well, but you’ll have to do some experimenting to find the formula that works best for you. Your spiritual side doesn’t have to hide when your money-making hat is on and vice versa – both sides can co-exist and help each other to grow.

My transition to a hard-nosed “results oriented” direct marketing type did not come suddenly, but eventually I did make a change – curtailing my Bohemian behavior to focus on developing my skills as an online marketer. For me the shift involved a jettisoning of habits I’d had for several years and a new seriousness of focus on the nitty-gritty of my new chosen career (I made my living as a carpenter before).

All this shifting has been part of my life’s journey and a largely positive thing, though not un-painful in some ways. Recently I’ve reconsidered some of my old notions, but in a new context coming from my experiences as a marketer and freelance copywriter/consultant.

New Age Nuttiness…

Even though I’ve been around the new age scene and had some extraordinary experiences, I don’t buy into all the wild ideas that “new thought” or “metaphysical” type people sometimes talk about. In particular, pertaining to making money I’ve been critical of a lot of the “laws of abundance” and “law of attraction” stuff going around, but I also try to keep an open mind.

For example: in no way will I tell you that if you sit in your bedroom and wish for somebody to give you a million dollars will you get it. I will tell you instead that it’s a very good and useful exercise to get a specific idea in your head about what you want to achieve. Then you have to take action in the marketplace of life to create the reality where somebody would write you a million dollar check, provided you had an idea worth that amount of money and the skill to sell it.

There’s a thing I learned in studying NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) that goes by different names but I prefer “evidence procedure“, which means the set of feelings and visualizations you can project into the future to show your mind what the outcome of your goal is going to be like. Rather than focusing on the goal, you tell your mind to fetch the specific outcome and the subsconcious mind takes care of lots of nitty-gritty details in between. You direct your mind to fetch the outcome, like a dog fetching a thrown stick, and your marvelous subsconscious brain works out many of the details of getting the outcome for you. It’s quite elegant and useful and worth learning about.

Napoleon Hill, if you’re familiar with his writing, was very specific in his book “Think and Grow Rich” that you can establish whatever intent you want in terms of the money you want, but in return you must also have a plan to deliver value to the marketplace. Furthermore, Hill repeatedly admonishes that in all probability many of your plans will fail to bear much fruit but that if you want to acquire monetary wealth you must persevere with great intensity.

The advantage of seeing success through a somewhat “spiritual” lens is that it can help you keep balance while you’re working hard to create prosperity for yourself. Your spirituality, if you call it that, can help you be both energized and relaxed about the whole process of making things happen for yourself, which can be a lot of work. Work without meaning becomes tedious and a chore. The thing about being an entrepreneur however is you have to maintain enthusiasm and creative flexibility and energy over a long period of time. A spiritual or philosophically grounded way of seeing success as a journey and a process can help you stick to your vision, stay empowered, and persevere for as long as it takes you to succeed.

How To Quintuple Your Income (Not Easy, But Tested and Proven To Work)

Loren Woirhaye — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 15:29:37 +0000

How To Quintuple Your Income (Not Easy, But Tested and Proven To Work) is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes

Good News… that sounds like bad news…

(this post was updated July 25, 2010)

If you haven’t started your internet business yet, you may be too late… if you’re an average person.

Average people would like to be rich and successful – but they won’t take the kind of rigorous action getting what they want requires. 95% of people are pretty average in terms of how ambitious they are, which means they don’t have the fire in the belly entrepreneurial success requires. Most of the people you know are average in this way – and thus are poor role models for the budding entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs and business owners pay themselves, on average, about 500% what they would make with their same skills as employees. Thus a $100,000 a year skill becomes a $500,000 a year skill. Most people surveyed would like to own their own businesses, yet most lack the aggressiveness to do so and remain employees for life.

Factoid
The word “employee” incidentally, has the same Scottish root as the words “ploy” and “exploit”. That should tell you something.

But If YOU Are Tired Of Working For Average Rewards And Want To Boost Your Income By 500% Here’s Some Advice To Help You Get There…

you cannot do it thinking like an employee. You have to shift your mindset to become an instigator. An instigator is one who sets events in motion. Creating that motion is what being and entrepreneur/marketer. No entrepreneur is not a marketer because entrepreneurs must always sell their ideas to the marketplace and sometimes to investors.

How To Get Money In The New Economy

The internet start-up marketplace is very, very crowded. It is like a gold rush. Only the most aggressive and fast-moving will get the big rewards. For feeble competitors there will be scant rewards. Tons of people have blogs and sites that could make them full-time incomes… yet only a tiny, tiny portion of those people make more than a few bucks a month. These folks, whatever their virtues, are feeble competitors in the new economy.

Even if you have already “started” your internet business, have you really got started ?

There’s a huge difference between putting up a blog or website and creating a business. The first thing is easy. I set up sites in under an hour. Setting up a real business is a different matter.

There is good news however. Innovation is not needed of you. Successful marketing is not a matter of innovation alone, as Emerson thought when he penned this fallacy:

“If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.”

Emerson may have been a fine writer, but he was a dope about marketing. He seems to have believed that innovation or quality alone would insure success.

In Emerson’s time it was not true, and it is not true today.

Innovation can be a powerful advantage, but if you are bootstrapping your own business, trying to innovate is likely tilting at windmills. Inventing something new and unproven can be slow, costly and draining. All too often the inventor emerges with little clue how to market the innovation.

The good news here is that imitating what is working for other businesses, and improving it where you can, is the surest route to profitability and, if you make appropriate choices, wealth.

Producing a quality product or service alone will not bring you money. Money from your internet, or any other kind of business, will only come as a result of salesmanship. There is an unprecedented quantity of quality information about how to start and market a business today. The internet puts so much useful information at your fingertips ignorance can be no excuse.

Therein lies the problem. The problem you may be having is not in knowing what to do, but it how to do it.

It is likely nobody ever taught you the job of marketing your business, especially online with all the tricks and twists and technology that comes into play. Sure, you can read up on how to “do SEO” or “article marketing” or “build a list” but unless you’re actually getting your hands dirty you aren’t learning how to do the job of marketing.

Of course, we marketing bloggers do our best to try to explain how to promote, but without action – and smart action too – you won’t get far trying to make money online. Internet marketing is a craft and it is intricate. If nobody has told you this before I tell you now.

Because marketing is intricate it is hard and it requires perseverance to succeed. As you persevere you learn and grow from experience and, gradually, you can become a skilled practitioner. Mentoring or coaching can speed the process in many cases. This is because chief among the decisions you must make is to decide what extraordinary value you will bring, yourself, to the marketplace in exchange for the money you desire.

This level of focus does not come easily to most people. Even many in the elite 5% have to work hard and struggle with their own doubts and self-limiting behavior for many years before they achieve that crystalline focus. Again, many books talk about how to do it – Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” is good to read, or read again if you have read it before. There is no substitute for single-minded determination in the getting of money, especially if you want to get a lot of it. And without focus that determination cannot take shape.